24- Six Tips for starting a business in a poor economy

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When there is a good economy that is booming, the temptation to start your own company or startup may be great — and that may be a driving force for you. But what if the economy is not so, and it leaves you with doubt as to whether or not to start your entrepreneurship in a bad economy.

Well, as you will hear in this audio episode, we highlight an article delivered at the web site of Strategy Driven.com. The title of the article is “4 Tips for starting a business in a poor economy.”

The four tips highlighted here are:

Location is crucial;
Use the economy to your advantage;
Start as small as can be; and
Watch the Competition closely.

[Editor’s note: I myself added 2 more tips that may be helpful for the planning by the potential entrepreneur. They are:

Try to plan for potential large competitive announcements that can destroy your marketing plans or products or offerings, due to hype and lies in the media and the propaganda delivered by these competitors; and
Determine how resilient you can be when the worst happens to destroy your product, offering, marketing, sales strategy and your dream.

With some research done by the authors, there are many charts of comparisons that are given in one of the tips — that of location. These charts are interesting and provide value for the aspiring entrepreneur to become a small business owner. They do so by letting the potential startup know the optimum location for a variety of factors — from taxes to survival rates to startup costs, etc. I feel that this provides recent information that can be valuable to the planning for the potential startup.

In addition, the tip on competition, there is also a reference to Alejandro Cremades and the article at Forbes.com which he wrote called “How to create a Marketing Plan.”

And, as I mentioned, a good reference from one of the top marketing plan consultants is Jay Ehret, who was once known for his podcast of The Marketing Spot. He delivers the best advice for creating and EXECUTING good marketing plans for entrepreneurs. As a matter of fact, his successful podcast show of The Marketing Plan Podcast delivers episodes still today.

Later on in this brief audio episode, I deliver a story from my own experience of being a startup with the best solution in the marketplace — and having the right product, with the right price, with the right marketing and the right sales plan and marketing plan. However, this was totally shattered and my plans were completely leveled due to the media hype, the lies and promotion at the launch of the Apple iPhone in 2010.

As you will hear in this audio episode, this came as a complete shock to me, as the timing was a large amount of the trouble, for if I had launched much earlier, the success rate of my product would have been much higher.

So I hope that your marketing plans do not encounter such hype and destructive competitive marketing as I did years ago. And for this, I wish you the best in adhering to these six tips for starting a small business in a poor economy.

Thank you for your attention.